Jail term for Pistorius the only justice
“I DON’T want to go back to jail. I don’t want to have to waste my life sitting there . . . I would like to believe that if Reeva could look down upon me that she would want me to live that life,” Oscar Pistorius said in his first interview with ITV, re-broadcast on Carte Blanche.
Did convicted murderer Pistorius just utter on international television that he didn’t want to go to jail and use Reeva Steenkamp as a scapegoat for evading the consequences he deserves?
Then he added, “If I was afforded the opportunity of redemption, I would like to help the less fortunate.”
The entitlement that this man embodies defies any logic, sense of fairness or consequences of his actions. Not once in the interview does Pistorius show remorse for what the Steenkamp family has had to endure because of his actions.
Despite his teary performance, not once does Pistorius get that Judge Thokozile Masipa’s sentencing of culpable homicide rather than murder was soft at its best and not justice, nor right or fair. Not once does he show some understanding of taking Steenkamp’s life too soon and literally taking her potential with his bullets.
It is always about Pistorius – how he feels and how he has suffered. No wonder the majority of the public views it as a public relations exercise devoid of any sincerity because this man fails to grasp the pain he has caused the Steenkamp’s family.
In a racialised country such as South Africa, Pistorius’s lack of remorse is bound to be viewed as entitlement stemming from white privilege and within a racial lens. Conversations with black South Africans pertaining to the case always centre on how if it was a black man who had committed the same crime, it would have resulted in a harsher sentence lacking any sympathy from Masipa or any other judge.
Masipa has a prior reputation of giving harsher sentences to black men. But when, as a black male friend described it, “it was a white man, she gave the South African public a speech of dolus eventualis to let the white man off when it did not make any sense”.
Pistorius, I hate to say, represents all that brings wounds to black South Africans – entitlement and luxury – perceived to be undeserved by white South Africans.
Masipa was the one, surprisingly, who bought Pistorius’s story when most of the rest of the South African public was not convinced. No one needed the courts to know that shooting at a bathroom door would render someone dead. No one needed any legal background to know Masipa’s dolus eventualis reasoning was language that was not justice for Steenkamp.
She and all women deserve better, and the interview added salt to gender violence wounds women of this country face daily.
A woman being killed by her partner only added credibility that a South African woman is most likely to be killed by her romantic partner. But Pistorius takes it to Shakespearean proportions worthy of an Academy Award.
The tears, the self-pity and playing for public sympathy make his words and actions after Steenkamp’s murder deplorable in the most basic sense. No matter what the public relations team may conjure up, South Africans, especially women, know this kind of violence all too intimately.
They see a murderer who deserves to go to jail and an athlete who throws his toys out of the cot when he doesn’t get what he wants. It is the script of all abusers gripped by the male privilege that a patriarchal society affords them.
All Pistorius’s first interview revealed is a man who lacks the internal character purported by his athletic achievements. Dani Allan describes Pistorius in the Daily Maverick as “someone with no innate integrity, no spirituality and one who had not developed as an individual”.
The ones who feel any sympathy for Pistorius are gripped in the idealism of a hero who defied the odds despite his disability. They desperately want the romance of Pistorius to be true when it is not.
They forget the reality that Pistorius is not entirely the hero the media purported him to be.
We as the public see his excellence as an athlete simply based, as Allan eloquently describes it, on “selfishness rather than selflessness and humanity without heart”. And him requesting a chance at helping the “less fortunate” appears the theatrics that it is.
The more he cries on television, the more the public sees a man who is coached, entitled and takes white privilege to another level.
Pistorius bought the gun, pulled the trigger and brutally killed Steenkamp. The only justice is for him to go to jail and the keys be thrown out, as should be the case with all murderers.
Anything less would be an injustice to Steenkamp and the many domestic violence victims in South Africa. Pistorius must go to jail. It’s logical.